Religion and public policy

Islam, Egypt and political theory

Échec mate

ON the face of things, this week's events in Egypt have validated a theory about Islam and society that seemed contrarian when it was first floated. In 1992 a French analyst of the Muslim world, Olivier Roy, published a book entitled "L'échec de l'Islam politique"—translated into English three years later as "The Failure of Political Islam".

Back then, political Islam—the idea that Islam could provide a platform for taking and exercising power in modern times—seemed to be doing quite well. The Islamic masters of Iran, having withstood a long war with Iraq, were looking for new places to extend their influence, including the former Soviet republics to their north. In Algeria, an Islamist party had won a clear electoral majority, triggering a military intervention and then a civil war whose outcome was anybody's guess. It seemed clear that wherever secular despots were willing to relax their grip, Islamist parties would step into the void.

But none of those things disproved the thesis of Mr Roy, who is now a professor at the European University Institute. One of his simplest but most compelling points was that for all its power as a mobilising slogan, Islam just does not provide the answers to the problems of governing a modern state. Quite recently the resurgence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the wake of the Arab spring seemed, once again, to challenge Mr Roy's analysis. But as of this week, he could be forgiven for saying: "I told you so."

In fact, he was saying more interesting things than that when I spoke to him today. These are some of the points he has made about the turmoil in Cairo. The Brotherhood regime in Egypt fell, of course, under the weight of its own incompetence (and in particular its failure to recruit technocrats) and its perceived nepotism. These sins fell short of big-time corruption, because the government did not last long enough to refine that art; but it still looked pretty bad. Nor, Mr Roy told me, could the Morsi government consolidate its power by "Islamising society"—one of the Brotherhood's stated goals—because Egyptian society was about as Islamised as it could be already.

So did that "Islamisation of society" represent a success at least for the Brotherhood's work as a semi-clandestine, semi-overt opposition movement over the past several decades? Not really, because Egypt's Islamised social world was not centrally co-ordinated, as the Brotherhood would like it to be, but highly diverse, with sub-cultures growing around particular charismatic preachers and theological trends. Egypt's Muslim majority might be devout, but it was also "modern" in the sense that more than one Islamic style was available and individuals could make their choice. Even the strict back-to-basics form of Islam known as Salafism was a kind of modern choice, in the sense that individuals, rather than groups, opt it into it.

Mr Roy is surely right to stress that Islam cannot provide detailed prescriptions for governing a modern state. As another scholarly Islam-watcher, Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim of America's Emory University, has pointed out, Islam cannot even provide a clear basis for the centralised administration of family law, even though Islamic texts have a huge amount to say about family law. That is because the very idea of centralised administration did not exist at the time when the various schools of Muslim family law were evolved; in those days many matters were adjudicated at the level of the local community or the clan.

But the fact that a political project is ultimately impossible will not stop people shouting for it, dying for it, trying their best to implement it. An ideology can still play an important role in history, even if it has little to contribute to the challenges of complex societies. And there is a sense in which all political projects, conceived in the abstract, are bound to fail when they face contact with hard reality. After all, as a famously jaded French philosopher said, at some level everybody fails in life.

You think that people live their lives by a book 100%. Come on can you be that naive? Have you ever lived in a Muslim country? I have lived in two, Iran and Indonesia. I lived in those two countries for 20 years. If people followed to Koran, there would be no corruption in Muslim countries? If it was that simple, why don't the US hire you to be Obama's Middle East adviser?

During the 1970s, political Islam was a minor force in the Middle East. Why did it resonate starting from the 1980s? Was it because of the Iranian Revolution?

Even in the so called Iranian Islamic Republic, people don't think o themselves purely in Islamic terms. Ahmadinejad in his second terms spent alot of time irritating both the West and the Supreme Leader. If you understand enough about Iranian society you would understand why.

Why would Iran look like today if Mohammad Mosaddegh was not overthrown? What would Indonesia look like today if 500,000 Indonesian Communist Party members were not slaughtered in 1965 (helped by the CIA). Indonesia at one point had the largest Communist Party outside Eastern Bloc and the oldest Communist Party in Asia. What would have happened if the Washington did not supply the Afghan guerrilla with Stingers in 1980s?

Christian fundamentalism is not a marginal phenomenon, not all. It has shaped the US in the last 50 years, Latin America, Africa and even countries like Indonesia and Singapore. Where do you think all those popular Sunni Imans and religious figures throughout the Muslim world learned to reach out to masses? Did they read it in the Koran? Hell, no they learned it from watching Christian evangelicals.

To be frank, what is the difference between propping up Saudis and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood? Tell me genius. By your logic, the US shouldn't support the Saudi's at all, right? All the MB wants to do is create Saudi Arabia lite. I don't get it, what is so threatening about the MB, when US support the country that produced Osama Bin Laden, most of the 9/11 hijackers, support Wahhabist schools that preach radicalism throughout the Muslim world. I know Muslim brotherhood's affiliation in some Muslim countries, and they are a lot more moderate than the guys the Saudi's prop up. How many of the the terrorist attacks in Pakistan, Indonesia, US of A, Britain, Spain by traced back to the MB and their affiliates and their schools? How many of the terrorist were educated/influenced by Wahhabist financed schools?

It does not start with Obama, its been going on for a very long time. Furthermore, MB was trying to improve relations with Iran, so your point of propping up the less murderous Jihadist rings hollow. In fact Saudi Arabia has no lost love for the MB.

"Truly modern societies, for example, should be able to send even the prime ministers and presidents to jail without any fuss"

I agree, but that begs the question: How many G7 countries have ever sent their serving or former elected heads of government to jail? I recall Richard Nixon was never sent to jail after Watergate, so I can only think of Kakuei Tanaka of Japan and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy as examples.

Huh! There is political riot almost every decade against minority muslims in India. It is more a majoritarianism than democracy. The hardliner Hindus are dying to elect Modi, a truly fascist minister who was responsible for killings more than two thousand innocent muslims...a lot of women were raped by organized mobs whom Modi protected.

In conclusion, all hardliners flourish under the protection of state government whether be it Afganistan's taliban, India's modi or German nazis.

Indica, you are absolutely correct in your comment about many highly educated Muslims living in the west and yet expressing their millennial aspirations based on Islam (something hard to explain without knowledge of Islamic history and development of the Islamic ethos).
My feeling on this is that their residency in the West is in large part due to the fact that living in the West is easier or perhaps safer than the struggle they would have to face to reform their societies/countries. Consider, political space in most Islamic countries is dominated either by dictators (recent winds of changes apart) and/or by religious fanatics, both of whom were until fairly recently supported to the hilt by the West. The educated Muslims living in the West have (relative to their societies) liberal pluralistic values, making them dangerous to the dictators and religious hardliners alike, whose response to any efforts by these people to have change in their countries would be life threatening violence.
The irony is that it is precisely this educated Muslim populace living in the West that has the grounding and knowledge to be able to synthesize the realities of the modern world with Islamic teachings and offer the Islamic world a framework that it can move forward with. However, given the current parasitical mindset of the elites of the Islamic world, that framework is the last thing that those elites want, since not only would mean giving up their unbridled power, but also mean that society would focus on bread and butter issues to move forward with, instead of being told that all their ills are due to their sins and can all be resolved through greater piety.

"student of history, I accidently asked "teacup" another commentor for your comments. My apologises, so can I kindly have your permission to quote some of your very interesting views if you do not mind? I would be very greatful as I am preparing a conference paper under the theme of "Transformation of Muslim World in the 21st Century". You may email me blak_ini@yahoo.com Thank you